Ninety-six and still going wild

Aug 24, 2012

Old Faithful is a cone glacier located in Wyoming, in Yellowstone National Park.

Photo by USGS.

Are you squeezing in one last hiking or camping trip this weekend?

If you’re spending one of the last summer weekends at a National Park, make sure to pack some party hats. This Saturday, August 25, 2012, is the 96th birthday of the National Park Service, home to some of the wildest places in America.

If you’ve ever been backpacking in Montana's Glacier National Park, in the Crown of the Continent landscape, or watched Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone, you know how important the National Park Service is to protecting wildlands. What you might not know is how much of America’s officially designated wilderness — the wildest of the wild — is located in America’s National Parks.

Related Content

Find out how wilderness is valuable to us all

As we become a more urbanized society with growing needs for space and energy, we often turn to wilderness as a resource. Yet, wilderness is not just a resource to be developed. It has many human, natural and economic benefits that we need to protect.